We need a holiday from Mr. Bean's face

"Mr. Bean's Holiday" is a comedy seemingly aimed at children and dimwits, an audience so vast in certain parts of the globe that the grunting, gurgling, grimacing Mr. Bean (Rowan Atkinson) has already earned nearly $200 million in 38 countries, even before extending his "Holiday" to America.

But the G-word that best describes the source of Mr. Bean's obvious international appeal is "gurning," which, like Bean himself, is a term much better known in England than America, meaning "the making of grotesque faces." In fact, the Wikipedia page on gurning lists Atkinson right behind Jim Carrey as one of the world's leading practitioners of grotesque face-making. And this is his ghastly masterpiece.

Mr. Bean's is a pose of perpetual stupefaction. Eyes bulge cartoonishly from their sockets, brows are raised and lowered like flags, the entire facial superstructure moving this way and that. Very little comes out of Mr. Bean's mouth, except his tongue, which advances and retreats in a disgusting darting motion.

There have been other rubber-faced comics in motion pictures - particularly silent ones - but few have had the outsize success of Atkinson's Mr. Bean, so how do we account for this? Is he that funny? Actually, no. In fact, "Bean" is a delicacy that seems not to travel well. And Atkinson himself, while funny in small doses in such films as "Four Weddings and a Funeral," has flopped in this country with such sputtering vehicles as "Johnny English.

Advertisement

"

What he does as Mr. Bean is somehow manage to turn his insides out, so that every emotion that passes through him instantly appears on his face. This is very appealing in cultures whose language centers are not yet well developed, such as kindergartens, and among fans of the late Benny Hill.

Character always trumps plot in a Mr. Bean adventure. In "Holiday," Bean wins a church raffle whose prize is a trip to the south of France, and off he goes to the south of France. There. That's the plot. It is the mishaps that follow him wherever he goes that cause the alleged hilarity to ensue.

We are given an early taste of this during a long and rather unfunny title sequence, when Bean realizes he has been taken to the wrong train station in Paris. He plots his course correction along a perfectly straight line, and then never deviates from it, leaving havoc in his wake. Will he barge into places where he has no business going? Or walk straight through insanely heavy traffic on the Champs Elysees? Take a wild guess.

Before boarding his train to Cannes - where the annual film festival just happens to be gearing up - Bean asks a fellow traveler (Karel Roden) to use the video camera that was part of his raffle prize to take a shot of him boarding the train. This causes the man to become separated from his young son (Max Baldry) as the train pulls out of the station, a dubious source of amusement for us, and more plot than poor old Bean can handle.

Foremost among the things that make this movie feel less like a comedy than an 87-minute coma is Bean's incessant need to experience his vacation entirely through his new camera. This means that you see the world not only through his bulging eyes, but also through his shaky handheld lens. As a result, he gets the holiday, you get the motion sickness. Thanks a lot.

After a series of mishaps with the boy, Bean loses his train ticket, and the pair are tossed off at a station in the middle of the French countryside. There he crosses the path of American director Carson Clay (Willem Dafoe), an arrogant auteur who is shooting his latest art house action picture while on his way to the film festival. Somehow this exchange results in an actress from Clay's set (Emma De Caunes) getting sucked into Bean's wobbly orbit.

Before his transit to the French seaside is complete, Bean completes his compact with the audience, a requirement that virtually all English comics eventually climb into a dress and high heels. But "Mr. Bean's Holiday" doesn't merely build toward its long sequence in drag, it remains one throughout.

`Mr. Bean's Holiday'

* 1/2

Mercury News

Rated: G (all audiences)

Cast: Rowan Atkinson, Emma De Caunes, Willem Dafoe, Karel Roden

Director: Steve Bendelack

Writers: Hamish McColl, Robin Driscoll

Running time: 1 hour, 27 minutes In English, French and Russian with subtitles.